Potential, Ignited.

At Leading Educators, we believe all students deserve great schools and exceptional teachers. And we know we aren’t alone. Day in and day out, districts and schools across the country—particularly in our most marginalized communities—are striving, sometimes struggling, to overcome challenges and make meaningful progress in closing the achievement gaps that impact underserved students. But our experience tells us we need to work smarter, not harder. More importantly, we need to work together.

That’s where we come in. Leading Educators works with districts and schools to maximize the effectiveness of their most important resources: their teachers. We lead educators to become the best versions of themselves, then empower them to lead their peers. When you take the passion and commitment of teachers, then add support, mentorship and opportunities for collaboration, you create networks of exceptional educators who foster thriving classrooms.

Leading Educators takes professional development out of enormous auditoriums and puts it where it belongs: in schools, working directly with individuals and small groups. Because educators can only effectively teach what they themselves understand, we focus on the content requirements students need to master, using methods that have been proven to work in the world’s most effective education systems.

At the end of the day we exist to create more equitable education for all students—so social justice is deeply embedded in our approach. Every educator is trained to identify and overcome the implicit biases that contribute to inequity, so they can create classrooms where every student has an equal opportunity to learn and grow.

We do all of this not on a scattershot basis, but system-wide, collaborating with schools and districts to co-create professional learning that’s customized to their unique needs, and designed for long-term self-sufficiency and scalability.

When we lead educators, and give them what they need to lead other educators, we create exponential impact across entire school systems, ensuring consistently exceptional teaching for every student in every classroom, day after day, year after year. Together with our partners, we improve not only learning outcomes, but life outcomes; we foster transformational change not just in schools, but in whole communities. That’s the power of empowered educators.

Yesterday and Today

We got our start in 2008 in New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina, local policy decisions created a need for external leadership support in schools. Leading Educators was founded to provide that support.

Today, we partner with districts across the country, focusing on underserved and marginalized communities where students are most likely to be affected by opportunity gaps.

In the 17-18 school year, we worked with 152 schools and 19 systems to develop the teacher leadership skills of 600 teacher leaders, impacting the work of 2,400 teachers and 65,760 students. Since 2008, we have worked with over 1,500 teacher leaders across the country.